1. Unplug Power and Open the top cover of the player 2. Remove power cable from DVD Drive 3. Remove IDE Cable from DVD Drive 4. Remove IDE Cable from Board 5. Plug the Y power adapter cable to the power adapter cable (what you removed from DVD Drive) 6. Plug one end of Y cable to DVD Drive 7. Place the brand new Western Digital 80GB Special Edition drive on top of DVD Drive 8. Set the jumper setting of Hard Drive as Slave 9. Plug the other end of Y cable to Hard Drive 10. Plug the Middle potion of the IDE cable (Provided by Western Digital) on board 11. Plug the short end of IDE cable to Hard Drive 12. Plug the long end of IDE cable to DVD Drive 13. Plug the power card 14. Press the eject button 15. Put the Firmware disk of 2.7.4 of 508 16. Close the Tray 17. You will see on screen display to power cycle 18 Press Power Cycle button 19. Firmware will be updated (first it will display Erasing .. then count starts 1,2,3,....100. 20. Player will eject the tray 21. Remove firmware cd from tray 22 Press Power Cycle button 23. This time you will see "First time hard drive preperation mesg". Do not touch anything on remote or player until the mesg disappears. 24. All you set with the 74632 MB Free of space

All of the above is true if you have Rev2 and Rev B mark on sigma chip and Brand new western digital 80GB

If you can get your hands on an old DP-330, then you can take its drive called: DVS-LDR DSL-720A LV17 and put it into the player instead of the Toshiba SD-M1802 they have today. After putting the drive into the DP-500 you do this with the remote:EjectClear276Under the region setting choose: AllSetup

You get a lot if you change the drive in your DP-500 to the Asus E616P2 drive, REMEMBER it HAS to be the P2 drive, or else this does not work!The player becomes more quiet, it becomes region free and it suddently supports DVD+ disks also.Before you build in the drive though, you have to flash it to region free. This is easely done with the RPC1 flash that you can download from here: http://tdb.rpc1.org/#E616P2Choose the 1.08 flash, this is the latest firmware for the drive. But be aware, flashing the drive wrong can damage it.After flashing to RPC1 you just change the drives in the player and after booting the player, make shure that the player is set to be region free with the above posted region hack.And thats it, its quiet, supports DVD+ and is region free.Injoy your new improved DP-500 that now has become better than the original.